About Me

Sunday, October 30, 2016

Something splendid
is happening in England. For many years, the nineteenth and early twentieth
century operatic and strictly comic-operatic (excluding, thus, the
opéras-bouffes of G&S et al) works of British composers have been all but ignored
by producers and recording companies. Now, in the 21st century, such pieces
seem to be being rediscovered by growing groups of enthusiasts, and gradually
transferred on to disc in fresh (and often first) recordings. Cheshire’s
Victorian Opera has been the leader in the field, with full recordings of such
pieces as The Maid of Artois, Robin Hood and
Lurline, but they are not alone in
the field. The latest welcome addition to the ranks of operatic lifesavers is
Retrospect Opera, whose 2015 recording of Ethel Smyth’s 1-acter The Boatswain’s Mate had somehow missed
my net until now. This piece, premiered in 1916, is, of course, from a
different era and in a different fach to that of brief nineteenth-century pieces
such as Jessy Lea (Macfarren) or Ages Ago or the parlour operettas
of Virginia Gabriel and her ilk, and, for me, falls somewhere between German’s Tom Jones and Britten’s Albert Herring in ambition and tone.
Albeit on a smaller scale.

This afternoon, I
have listened to The Boatswain’s Mate
in toto for the first time. Because Retrospect, all power to them, have issued
it in an in toto version. Dialogue and music.

I

t is an odd
piece. Wiser than I have pontificated on its merits and shape (and the
excellent booklet with the record, plus Smyth’s voluminous writings, will help
one understand all that), all I need to say here is, I feel the original tale
was as odd a choice for operaticisation as Albert
Herring. I would have expected a jolly little tale like this to have been
illustrated more in the Cox and Box or
The Zoo style. But it has been handed
half-an-operatic treatment. Only half, because the first part is music and
dialogue (ie comic opera), the second part sung through. Personally, I much
prefer the second part, even though Smyth’s libretto (or whoever’s, but that’s
another story) is nicely colloquial and sparky in its dialogue, if
super-conventional in action. The story is simple. The retired Mate of the
title sets up a fake robbery to kid a widder inkeeperess into his arms. The
plan backfires and the lady gets sweet on the bloke who ‘played’ the robber. You
can imagine the original tale, dramatised, as a 20 minute curtain-raiser on a
programme at a minor Victorian theatre. But Ms Smyth’s music shifts it into a
different and more pretentious dimension. My problem with this is that you
don’t quite know where you are. Opera? Musical comedy? Comic opera? It is definitely
not necessary to fit a work such as this into a conventional box, but … well, whatever
it is, it’s a lively little entertainment.

The recording has
been carefully and lovingly done. The ‘reduced’ orchestrations are quite
outstanding (I worry to think how overwhelming the ‘full’ ones must have been!)
and delightfully played, and the performances of the three and a half players
are all in keeping. I liked best the tenor, Edward Lee, who sang with open,
English tones and natural-sounding words. Elsewhere we had a little bit of woof
and incomprehensible lyrics.

But Retrospect has
seen fit to let us hear, as a bonus, the original cast recordings. The sound,
of course, is rather ‘archival’, but we hear exactly the ‘right’ voices.
Courtice Pounds, somewhere between singing on the music-halls, and starring as
Ali Baba in Chu Chin Chow and
Schubert in Lilac Time is Benn, the
Mate, the incomparably crisp-and-clear baritone Frederick Ranalow (who actually
recorded a stunning Tom Jones) is the
fake thief, and the New Zealand soprano Rosina Buckman – between an Isolde and
a Musetta – who was a favourite recording artist, partly indeed because of her
precise diction, was the widder. Like other archival recordings, these might
not make easy listening, but they tell us definitively what this music was
written to sound like.

The 2-disc set
finishes triumphantly with a restored period recording of the overture to
Smyth’s The Wreckers. All I can say
is, can I please hear the rest of The
Wreckers!

This is a grand
project, well conceived and carried out. It brings a work, and a composer,
which and who shouldn’t be forgotten or abandoned, back into the public eye.
That is the kind of ‘retrospecting’ I like and admire, and I look forward
eagerly to Retrospect Opera’s next offering.

PS: I discover that The Wreckers was recorded in 1994, by the same conductor. Hello, ebay...

The Boatswain's Mate can be got through www.retrospectopera.org.uk/CD_Sales.html

Saturday, October 29, 2016

‘The [original] show emerged as a thoroughly
entertaining 80 minutes, endearing in its half-attempts to outrage, innocently
unsexy with its black suspenders, cross-dressing, tap-dancing and silhouetted
grunting, always keeping to the comic-strip and avoiding the campy, and
inspiring the same enjoyment as the ghastly-funny films which were its
inspiration’. (Encyclopaedia of the
Musical Theatre)

Rocky the stage
show and I go back a long way. Right back to that very first production of 1973.
I can’t remember whether I saw it at the Royal Court, but I do recall seeing it
in the King’s Road and, again, when it transferred rather uncomfortably to the
West End, where its delightful ingenuousness and its little message of ‘don’t
dream it, be it’ (ie, screw whomsoever you like) had become a bit polished and
middle-class. The production was made into a deliciously low-budget film, with
many of the original cast, which captured the flavour and essence of the
original splendidly.

‘A film version,
The Rocky Horror Picture Show, with Curry, O'Brien, Quinn and Little Nell
featured alongside Susan Sarandon and Barry Bostwick, was a quick failure, but
only a temporary one. It later became a late-night campus favourite and, as the
show had done in the King's Road, began to attract regulars. A cult grew up,
complete with little audience rituals performed with matches, rice, water and
frozen peas and involving chanted responses to the dialogue, as the film found
itself a semi-permanent home in a number of specialist cinemas. In Britain,
would-be cultists could not find the film, but regional theatres and then the
touring circuits took up the stage show and British youngsters transferred the
American film liturgy to the stage show. It proved so popular, that soon -- in
contrast to the lesson learned earlier -- the show was playing some of the
vaster provincial houses to accommodate the audience demand. Fortunately, they
also had the staff to clean up the water, the matches, the unfrozen peas and
the soggy rice, but many a Rocky musical
director bewailed a synth keyboard clogged up by rice between the keys.

Under the influence of all this flim-flam, of course,
the character of the show as first staged got lost. The performance became like
an interactive game, and many of the performers lost the innocently winning
tone of the original, which was now replaced by a kind of pantomime silliness.
At one stage, in the British provinces, the essentially masculine Frank 'n' Furter
was played by a female impersonator…’

The Rocky Horror Picture Show, with the young Tim Curry
as the classic Frank,is a wee
classic of its era, which shouts infintesimal budget and has all the flavour of
the Royal Court Upstairs. So why, in 2016, has Fox remade it? Does the youth of
today not respond to the original style and cast of the show, which are and
were so integral to the nature and success of Rocky? Do they need a more C21th bent and modern film techniques to
make it seem ‘relevant’? I suppose so. Anyway, Rocky 2016 came on my screen this week and I settled down to watch
it with trepidation. And got one huge surprise. It was (almost) great. It was
certainly highly enjoyable. The director has kept the necessary Upstairs
flavour, it was shiny but tatty, re-orchestrated of course and enlarged as to
cast, but mostly seemed to stick to the ‘real’ script and scenes, and most of the
principal roles were superbly filled.

My personal favourites were Adam Lambert (whom I know only as one of the
better talent quest pontificators) as a searing, rocking, sexy Eddie – Frank
must have been mad to consider him second-rate goods – and Annaleigh Ashford,
who was so convincing and perfect as Columbia that she almost stepped out of
the comic-book and into the real and dramatic.

Next up: Janet. Victoria Justice
was the Janet of my dreams, with a delicious petite soprano topping off a grand
ingénue performance and hurrah! A brunette. Once again I can’t imagine the role
better played.

Staz Nair was a copybook Rocky, down to the (not very) little
gold shorts, sweetly clunky and wide-eyed, not Schwarzenegger muscle-bound, and
giving us some of our best laughs, as when Janet sweetly admitted to not liking
muscled men and Frank hissed ‘I didn’t make him for you..!’. But she got him anyway.

Ryan McCartan is probably my favourite Brad of recent decades, and the
casting of the starry Ben Vereen as Dr Scott was a good trick, though one would
have liked to see more of the famous legs. Reeve Carney was a nicely
understated Riff Raff, Christina Milian a pneumatic and rather overstated
Magenta … and that leaves the hole in the bagel. The reason I probably won’t
watch this Rocky again, in spite of
its multiple joys.

I don’t know who Laverne Cox is, but he/she should never have been cast
in the role of Frank ‘n’ Furter. Frank is a man. A man. He is a ‘sweet
transvestite’. A man wearing women’s clothes. He is not an hermaphrodite. This
Frank, with breasts bulging out of his ott costumes, reminded me of the sad
days when various drag queens were cast in the role in the British provinces.
The whole guts and heart went out of the show. The central character had been
destroyed. And so it was here. It was only the brilliant casting of the rest of
the roles which stopped the show from sinking into the hole in the centre of
the affair created by this wholly unsuitable idea.

What a damned, damned shame. When all else in the staging, directing and
casting was so superbly managed. I wonder what poor Tim Curry, looking ever so
old and ill (I gather he, like me, has suffered a stroke) popping in a few words here and there as the narrator, thought of
what had become of his famous role.

So, my verdict. A very tasty bagel indeed. With a big hole in the
middle.

Friday, October 14, 2016

When Stephen Sondheim
wrote that lyric, it was part of a list of the horrors of airline travel, as
perceived by an unprincipled, youngish, middle-classish American couple sampling
international flying. The song is delicious, but I have never understood why
Doris Day was included. I would love a Doris Day movie on a plane: all we get
nowadays is American car chases and guns, Inglorious Basterds and a feeble film of
Into the Woods. By S Sondheim.

Well, today I
willingly went to the new and and splendid little risen-from-the earthquake
Rangiora cinema-cum-theatre to see (nearly) 90 minutes of Doris Day. No, not a
film. A live show. A one-woman show. And that one woman was the reason I roused
myself from my fireside, in the rain, on a Friday afternoon to drive up to
Rangiora.

Ali Harper is a
New Zealand national treasure. She is the country’s outstanding female musical
theatre performer, and has been such – though still young -- for a good few
years. We were lucky enough to secure her for the leading role in Paul Graham
Brown’s Fairystories …

So, Doris? Ali Harper’s show is a truly one-woman
affair. A delightfully conceived, arranged and staged (dir: Stephanie McKellar)
piece which, with the help of a fine video background, dances elegantly between
Doris’s screen persona and her less than lovely private life. Other folk are
heard as voices (including her beloved dog) but the show is all Doris/Ali,
whether relating faux cheerfully the horrors of the men in Doris’s life,
lavishing good will on her screen leading men (a surprising number of whom seem
to have been gay) and, most importantly, singing those songs we associate with
La Day. The highlight for me was the star’s performance of ‘Secret Love’. Oh, I
should say, Ms Harper actually has a ‘better’ voice than Ms Day. Her singing is
impeccable and beautiful.

This show is
designed for a specific audience. We who remember, and enjoyed, Doris Day.
Amongst the audience (amazingly numerous) today, I must (at 70) been one of the
bottom-quarter by age. But, as an 80 year-old lady (who I’d taken for 60) said
to me in the foyer: ‘at last, a show for us’. Well, it shouldn’t be just for
‘us’. I know many of Doris Day’s songs were best-selling (at the time) soup.
But some were not. ‘Que sera sera’ and ‘Secret Love’ will last a lot longer
than the latest Beyonce aria.

So, en somme, I
spent a thoroughly enjoyable 80 minutes in the theatre this afternoon, with a
memorable performer, one glass of wine and the feeling that I was surrounded by
folk who were absolutely loving the entertainment. When I left the auditorium,
virtually the entire audience of several hundred were lined up for a CD and a
chat with ‘Doris’. If that’s not entertainment, what is.

Saturday, October 8, 2016

One thing leads to
another …Answering various
queries, after my recently re-published (15 years after it was written) article
debunking the mythology surrounding the production of ‘the first American
musical’ (it was far, far from it), I got sidetracked into other unexplained details
concerning that pasticcio leg-show spectacular, details which are glibly
repeated by one ‘Broadway’ website and another. And Wikipedia.The most
attractive and success-bringing elements of the original production of The Black Crook were, of course, its
scenery, its massed troupes of little ‘dancing’ girls and its genuine-star
dance soloists (when the advertisements could spell their foreign names
correctly), but, somewhere in there, there was some dialogue, lots of incidental
and dance music and the odd song.The music. Let’s
get the music credit for the show correct. The show was a pasticcio of music
old, oldish and made for the occasion. Such new music as was required was – as
the bills clearly state, and as was the custom of the time – the work of the conductor,
Thomas Baker. The usual formula was ‘the music selected, arranged and composed
by …’. Quite who decided (in modern times) to tack the name of Giuseppe Operti
on to the credits I know not. Il Signor Operti (‘pianist to His Majesty the King of Sardinia’) was, at the time of the Black
Crook’s opening, strumming the keyboard in Dundee, Scotland, at the
Alhambra Music Hall. Since 1856, he had been living in Britain, where his
engagements had included the post of prompter at Drury Lane, playing piano at Holder’s Music Hall, Birmingham, with
the Italian opera stars in Dublin, and producing four performances of Verdi’s Macbeth for the Ladies’ Garibaldi
Benefit Fund (oh dear! poor King of Sardinia!) at Birmingham Theatre Royal. With himself in the title-role. It
was 1869 before he decided that the grass was potentially greener beyond the
Atlantic, and headed for New York. I see him first (‘Signor Operti of Europe’)
conducting at the new Tammany Hall. Anyway, he stayed in America, worked in
mostly similar posts, composing, like Baker, when required, as he had in
England, and died in Leadville, Colorado in 1886 wgihe touring with another girlie legshow. And, in between, he took the baton for a Niblo’s ‘version’
of the Black Crook in 1872 (12
February) on which occasion he took a conductor’s privilege of shovelling as much as possible of his own
music into the programme, between the dances and the acts (snake-charmer, horse
act, monkeys and goats, the Majiltons etc), of what was now a veritable variety
show. And, of course, shovelling the original out.‘Signor G Operti had composed considerable
new music for portions of the spectacle’ reported the press. So that is the
Signor’s connection with The Black Crook.
The bones of the show under the same name anyhow. Five years after the original production, in a very
approximate ‘revival’.The other name
which finds its way into the www music credits is that of George Bickwell. Associated
with one Theodore Kennick (words). These two gentlemen were the announced
writers of the most popular of the ‘selected and arranged’ part of the score, a
song entitled ‘You naughty, naughty men’, sung in the show by the English
music-hall artist billed as ‘Millie Cavendish’. I wonder why no one has thought
to investigate these three folk, considered by some to be so important to the
History of The American Musical Theatre.‘Millie’ got me
into this, so I’ll leave her till last. George and Theodore? Strange, that two
writers who turned out such a popular song don’t seem to have written anything
else. In fact, they don’t seem to turn up anywhere. I began to suspect that
they didn’t exist. That they were ‘authors of convenience’, covering the fact
that ‘Millie’ had brought her song, manufactured to her needs, maybe from other
folks’ material, from England. But then, I found George. Just one mention. In
1858-9. He was a very (very) minor music-hall pianist in London, and played accompaniments for J H Ogden, on tour. Did he compose
or arrange the music for her music-hall act? And what about the words … ?Alas, I can’t get at
the script to see if the rest of this song (music and lyrics by J? Webster) is the same, but I
shouldn’t be surprised. Anyway, I would say that what one historian labels as
an important song in the timeline of American show-songwriting is, in fact, a
mish-mash of old English material sailing under fake colours.Post scriptum: I can't let these folk go. And I have found a little more George. It appears that his name was rightly George Day Backwell, son of Devonshire musician Joseph Lewis Backwell and his wife Helen Day. His younger brother Joseph Day B was also a muso. And the reason that he didn't write any more songs, is that he couldn't. Round about the opening night of The Black Crook -- maybe even before, I hope after --George died, at Brentford, at the age of 34. Brother Joseph had died at 27. Father died in 1867. I hope George's widow/partner collected the royalties. Or, dreadful thought, was Bickwell-Backwell listed as the composer of the song BECAUSE he was dead ... only a death certificate would tell for sure.STOP PRESS: It seems that 'Millie's real name was Mary Annie Gater. She got into the law courts in 1859 and 1862 for reasons of debt and marital or 'marital' disruptions ... one day, I'll look further ...In 1840 (12 May),
the Haymarket Theatre produced a version, by Frederick Webster, of Duvert and
Lauzanne’s French farce Le Commissaire
Extraordinaire, under the title The
Place-Hunter. Tom Wrench starred, and Priscilla Horton was the soubrette,
Babille, with a song. Called ‘O you naughty, naughty men’. ‘I puts it to you
and I leaves it to you’ as another American show says. And I am willing to be
proven wrong. But I bet I’m not.And now, ‘Millie
Cavendish’. Whom the press at one time claimed mendaciously to be ‘of the
Theatre Royal, Drury Lane’. Here is another person who doesn’t appear to have
existed. Well, in spite of the grave in Greenwood Cemetery, King’s, labelled
‘Millie Cavendish, died 23 January 1867’, and a Wikipedia article, she didn’t.
And this one I can sort out much better than I can George and the wretched
Theodore.‘Millie’ lived
only for the short time she appeared on the Niblo’s stage. But she’d spent
fifteen years, in England, as a characteristic vocalist on the music-halls
under a different name. She was (either really, or just professionally) Mrs
Lawrence. Just that. I have searched and searched for Mrs ? Lawrence and her
husband in the public records of the day, but so far with no luck. But I have
plenty of sightings of them in action, beginning in Sheffield’s Royal Adelphi
Concert Hall in August 1852. Mr L is part of a blackface double-act with one
John Stolber (d Cairo 26 November 1869), and Mrs L is doing her serio-comic
act. Songs and ‘mimic of men and manners’. Both acts were successful. Lawrence
and Stolber ‘the Albanian Minstrels’ played in Germany, Spain, Egypt and
doubtless elsewhere as well, until Stolber’s death. Mrs L played first-class
halls, often topping the bill. I track her from Sheffield to Rendle’s Hall,
Portsea, to Chatham’s Railway Saloon, and in 1855 to London’s Surrey Music
Hall, the Middlesex, Holder’s Birmingham, the St Helena Gardens, Jude’s in
Dublin the Whitebait, Glasgow, and then – in 1858 -- to the daddy of them all,
the Canterbury Hall.Wilton’s, the
Raglan, Deacon’s, the London Pavilion, the Marylebone and back to the provinces
at Hull, Scarborough (‘combines a fine figure, pleasing deportment and a
musical voice’), the Manchester Free Trade Hall Monday Pops, Leeds Amphitheatre
(‘a great success’) et al. In 1864 she was seen at the Knightsbridge, the
Pavilion, the Marylebone, alongside a certain Signor Alberto who would become
Alberto Laurence and a well-known New York singing teacher, at the Lansdowne
Islington Green, in 1865 she was starred at Holder’s … but she is less in
evidence than heretofore. I spy her at the Marylebone in April 1866 … and then
comes the trip to America, the invention of ‘Millie’ and her sad death.Mrs Lawrence (Mr
seems to have disappeared off to foreign parts with good pal Stolber some years
ago) had had a fine career, and , so it is said, in spite of a handicap. She was, the press reported, an
epileptic. And she was said to have died in her New York digs from a cranial
injury suffered during a fit. Some of the newspapers said it was an ‘apoplectic
fit’ and her almost wholly incorrect death registration at Greenwood Cemetery goes with that. I suppose some were less charitable. One paper proffered that she had a
husband and two children in London. Greenwood has her as 30, and single. I’ll find them in the end. But first I’ve
got to find out what they were called!So, there we are.
A little more clarification, the demystification of a few more folk, but a good
deal still to find. But if I publish this now, maybe someone else can lay hands
on some proof. Find a copy of The
Place-Hunter. Find some first names for the Lawrences (is he the George
‘singer and dancer’ in the 1861 census?). Find … well, anything relevant …